


The Art of Blades

by Hastrica



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Keyblade Master Aqua (Kingdom Hearts), Keyblade Wielder Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Keyblades (Kingdom Hearts), POV Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Swordfighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24236545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hastrica/pseuds/Hastrica
Summary: Aqua teaches Kairi how to fight like a Keyblade Master. Riku teaches her the rest.
Relationships: Aqua & Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Kairi & Riku (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 39





	The Art of Blades

Aqua doesn’t give so much as a sigh after the roughly ten seconds their first sparring match lasts. She calmly requests another go, with predictable results, and doesn’t shake her head or roll her eyes, not even a little bit. She just smiles without a hint of mockery or exasperation, and then begins by talking about stances.

In the days that follow, Kairi realises for the first time why there is such a thing as a Keyblade Master, and why Aqua carries that title. She learns about how the movements in a fight can be broken down into stances, patterns and forms analysed by generations of fighters before her and exhaustively described and illustrated. Aqua can put a name to every single form, poetic terms like the Fairy or the Crane, and Kairi soon learns them by heart as well, memorises how they interact and flow into one another. She understands how fighting effectively means weaving one form into the other and composing a series of movements that can deal with any attack. She reads through the manuals in the library of the Land of Departure in the evenings, after her lessons, and dreams of openings and guards, parries and ripostes during the nights. By the fourth day, she finds herself falling into the stances by instinct.

Merlin’s training never covered any of this. The old mage did little more than summon illusions for her and Lea to fight, never stingy with praise when they managed to whack the mindless creatures out of existence. He never mentioned the importance of footwork or controlled breathing or of how a guard stance can be used to strike a killing blow against an opponent that advances too impetuously. 

After a week, the clock Aqua uses to time their bouts shows thirty-three seconds before Aqua disappears in a flash and Kairi doesn’t even get to turn around before a Keyblade comes to rest against her neck. Embarrassment surges inside her at the ease with which she has been bested yet again. She feels hopeless, her resolve broken.

But Aqua’s words cut through Kairi’s despondency as she beams at her in an almost Soraesque way and declares her ready to move on from the basics.

Kairi has always known the Keyblade is the power of her heart made manifest, but now Aqua speaks of the abilities the Keyblade grants its wielder through this connection. Blade-trance, she calls it, a word that Kairi already knows from the tomes. The marriage of discipline and emotion; the art of drawing power from deep-seated feelings and channeling them in one’s mind, using the keyblade as a conduit. Aqua speaks of it almost reverentially and calls it the core of Keyblade fighting, and Kairi remembers what she saw Sora and Riku do in battle, how they seemed to treat things like gravity and inertia as mere suggestions instead of laws. These feats, Aqua maintains, come from the heart, and it is the heart’s power that allows a skilled wielder to perform them.

Then Aqua takes her away from the books, long before it gets too tedious and theoretical, and the next weeks are spent in relentless drills where they meditate and fight and slowly forge the connection between heart and weapon. The sessions get more demanding as Aqua forces her to move past her limits again and again, and every night Kairi collapses onto her bed in a state of total exhaustion, the ache from her muscles nevertheless barely registering because her brain refuses to do any more work and demands time off.

She delves deep into her own heart, looking for emotions that could fuel her blade-trance, and finds fury. Red-hot rage at the thought of being useless and requiring protection, seething anger at the memory of how helpless she was when Xemnas grabbed her, how she could do nothing but watch as Sora faded away because she wasn’t strong enough. It burns so bright within her that she can barely contain herself the next time she steps into the ring, on the twenty-fourth day. It is the first day the duel lasts longer than a minute, and when Aqua stops the clock she seems ever so slightly out of breath.

She learns about the use of magic in battle and isn’t surprised when Aqua begins expanding the combat forms with spells, teaching her how to supplement one’s offensive with roaring fire or how to incapacitate multiple enemies with lightning drawn from the power of her soul. She comes to recognise the minuscule change in the air that precedes the use of magic, and learns to repel it in the same way as a blow. Her blade-trance becomes a state of intense concentration, all senses heightened to the point where she imagines she can hear Aqua’s heartbeat. Spells erupt from her fingertips as swiftly as a thought. The idea that summoning her Keyblade takes any effort at all seems laughable to her now.

On the evening of the thirty-sixth day, Kairi whirls around in a parry that owes nothing to thought any more, and Aquas flash-step attack falters, Keyblades clashing in a flurry of sparks. On the fiftieth day, they duel for what seems an eternity before Aqua’s experience and skill wins out. When they recap the fight and Aqua claims it could have gone either way, Kairi chooses to believe her. It is hard to argue when Aqua’s voice has that little quaver in it that gives away how proud she is. The clock shows five minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

It is the fifty-first day when Aqua suggests that she take a break to visit her parents on the Islands, refusing to elaborate further.

***

Aqua’s motive for sending her home becomes apparent the moment she arrives. There is no universe in which she wouldn’t greet the tall young man who awaits her at the landing zone with anything else than a fierce hug. Riku deflects her inquiries regarding his whereabouts over the last months and only shakes his head when she asks for any leads on Sora, but lifts the mood by bringing up her training, genuine curiosity written all over his face.

She ends up with all the air knocked out of her within even less than ten seconds. She opens with the stance that according to Aqua is called the Gate, reaches inside her heart for the blade-trance, and as she moves past his guard and behind him in a flash, his boot catches her in the stomach and sends her flying.

She picks herself up, waving away his words of concern, and asks him what that move is called. He looks at her as if she’d suggested he ask Maleficent out on a date.

Riku, as turns out, has never heard of the Wave or the Lion or the blade-trance. He just hits as hard as he can, with everything he has, and what makes him a Master - because he is one too, Kairi reminds herself after losing count of how many times their matches have concluded with her facedown in the sand - is born from fighting for his life. She locks blades with him and his knee suddenly hovers an inch from the spot between her legs, and he is almost embarrassed as he explains what this would have done to her, had it connected. She vaults over him in a perfect execution of the Sunrise, and he grabs her leg and slams her to the ground. He has only one Keyblade, like her, but he seems to have a dozen arms and legs, each of them a weapon.

Riku doesn’t have names for any of his moves, and there are no illustrations and treatises this time. But he does have the patience to stop during any moment of their duel and point out, in his calm tones, how at this point she has left herself open to a well-placed kick or punch or how a so inclined opponent could grab her and make her life difficult. He tells her to take one hand off her weapon sometimes and look for opportunities to, as he puts it, introduce it to the enemy’s soft parts (and he grins as he says that). When she comes at him, believing herself ready for anything, he blinds her with a cloud of sand kicked up by an Aero spell aimed at the ground. He teaches her how to encase one of her limbs in a Protect spell so she doesn’t break a bone in her hand when she punches someone in the face, and Kairi is dead sure Aqua doesn’t even know about this technique.

There are, Kairi muses during a lull, quite a lot of things Aqua hasn’t told her about Keyblade fighting yet, and some of them are a lot meaner and nastier than you would expect reading those fencing manuals with their sketches and sophisticated explanations. When Riku introduces her to grappling (and both of them are glad that nobody is around when he does) she at first doesn’t understand why anyone would use their bare hands over their Keyblade, until he asks her what would happen if an opponent who has their arms around you summoned a Fire spell. 

There is no end to the list of dirty tricks he has up his sleeve, and he doesn’t hold back either. Kairi feels herself develop a certain kind of paranoia as fast as she collects bruises, always on guard for the next underhanded move and inevitably surprised by it nonetheless. At some point she gives up on trying to anticipate them and decides to just try to be fast enough to react to them, and when she tells Riku about this, he laughs and says yes, that is the point. You can never know what your opponent will do, so learn to think on your feet, be prepared for anything and always make life as hard as possible for whatever you’re fighting.

Some of the moves Riku brings up are so lethal that he only demonstrates them on a haphazardly strung together dummy made of driftwood and palm leaves, cautioning her never to use them in a sparring match. Kairi watches in fascination (and a fair amount of horror, as her imagination replaces the dummy with a person of flesh and blood) as he dismisses his Keyblade in the middle of a downward strike and resummons it at the end of the movement, the dummy falling apart with five feet of heartsteel suddenly materialising inside of its body. She wonders about when and how Riku came up with this move and hopes she will never have to use it herself.

The more she learns, the more she wonders about how her training would play out if it were Sora teaching her all this. Sora probably wouldn’t know the names of the battle stances either; the very thought of Sora sitting down and memorising the counters to the Cobra strike makes her grin. At the same time she can’t quite picture Sora fighting as dirty as Riku does. He certainly never did when she was there to watch him.

When she sees him again, she is going to find out.

**Author's Note:**

> As great as Re:Mind was for granting us a Kairi that can go to town on Xehanort, this story assumes she did little more than what the game originally gave her and seeks to rectify that first chance she gets. I'll probably use this as the base for more exploration of Kairi as a capable fighter. Stay tuned.


End file.
